preferred way to setup a LAMP stack on a laptop for development?

["Brendan Kidwell-2" <user=1552@nabble.blu.org>]

 I have Ubuntu 7.10 running on my Thinkpad laptop, and I think I want to 
start doing some PHP/mysql projects on it, since I've never really BUILT 
anything with PHP, and it might be a good idea to get that kind of 
experience. 

Two choices I see immediately, for getting Apache and PHP and friends 
working nicely are XAMPP < http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html > and 
the standard Ubuntu repositories and packages. Here are my thoughts so far: 

XAMPP: 

+ very simple to setup a the exact same environment later on some other host 
(any OS) 
+ easy backup (comes with a shell script that does a proper database and app 
code backup) 
+ nice control panel 
+ easy start and stop of the entire development environment with one command 
+ easy switch between PHP4 and PHP5 major versions 
- doesn't integrate with dpkg, no single-command system upgrades 
- possibility of package and port conflicts in the future (ex: install 
desktop application X, which depends on and installs mysql, which fails to 
start because the port is already taken...) 
- may lag behind latest upstream packages available from Apache, PHP, mysql, 
etc. 

Apache, php, mysql, etc from Ubuntu repository: 

+ one command updates packages to latest Ubuntu-blessed versions 
+ more up to date versions of packages available in repository 
- could take a while to learn how to tweak everything so that apache is 
properly integrated with php, mysql works from php, php knows where the 
ancillary tools like ImageMagick are found, etc.; why worry about this if 
I'm only ever going to deploy on a shared host where this is Someone Else's 
Problem? 
- no built-in backup command 
- if you want control panels you'll have to find them and install them 
yourself, otherwise you've got to edit lots of config files 

I'm leaning towards purging any Ubuntu version of apache and mysql I might 
have, and then installing XAMPP. Does anyone have any advice or experience 
to share, or other packages to suggest? 

What about code editing? I'm probably going to use a plain text editor, but 
if I opt for an IDE, what's a good IDE for PHP/mysql development? 

Brendan Kidwell 

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